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.So anyhow there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, in Berkeley, California, inthe fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat.The reason why I m a freelance writer and living inpoverty is (and I m admitting this for the first time) that I am terrified of Authority Figures likebosses and cops and teachers; I want to be a freelance writer so I can be my own boss.It makes sense.I had quit my job managing a record department at a music store; all night every night I was writingshort stories, both science fiction and mainstream.and selling the science fiction.I don t reallyenjoy the taste or texture of horsemeat; it s too sweet.but I also do enjoy not having to be behind acounter at exactly nine A.M., wearing a suit and tie and saying, Yes ma am, can I help you? and soforth.I enjoyed being thrown out of the University of California at Berkeley because I would nottake ROTC boy, an Authority Figure in a uniform is the Authority Figure! and all of a sudden, as Ihand over the 35¢ to the Lucky Dog Pet Store man, I find myself once more facing my personalnemesis.Out of the blue, I am once again confronted by an Authority Figure.There is no escape fromyour nemesis; I had forgotten that.The man says, You re buying this horsemeat and you are eating it yourselves. He now stands nine feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds.He is glaring down at me.I am, inmy mind, five years old again, and I have spilled glue on the floor in kindergarten. Yes sir, I admit.I want to tell him, Look: I stay up all night writing science-fiction stories andI m real poor, but I know things will get better, and I have a wife I love, and a cat named Magnificat,and a little old house I m buying at the rate of $25 a month payments, which is all I can afford butthis man is interested in only one aspect of my desperate (but hopeful) life.I know what he is going totell me.I have always known.The horsemeat they sell at the Lucky Dog Pet Store is only for animalconsumption.But Kleo and I are eating it ourselves, and now we are before the judge; the Great Assizehas come; I am caught in another Wrong Act.I half expect the man to say, You have a bad attitude. That was my problem then and it s my problem now: I have a bad attitude.In a nutshell, I fearauthority but at the same time I resent it the authority and my own fear so I rebel.And writingscience fiction is a way to rebel.I rebelled against ROTC at U.C.Berkeley and got expelled; in fact was told never to come back.I walked off my job at the record store one day and never came back.Later on I was to oppose the Vietnam War and get my files blown open and my papers gone throughand stolen, as was written about in Rolling Stone.Everything I do is generated by my bad attitude,from riding the bus to fighting for my country.I even have a bad attitude toward publishers; I amalways behind in meeting deadlines (I m behind in this one, for instance).Yet, science fiction is a rebellious art form and it needs writers and readers with bad attitudes anattitude of, Why? Or, How come? Or, Who says? This gets sublimated into such themes asappear in my writing as, Is the universe real? Or, Are we all really human or are some of us justreflex machines? I have a lot of anger in me.I always have had.Last week my doctor told me that myblood pressure is elevated again and there now seems to be a cardiac complication.I got mad.Deathmakes me mad.Human and animal suffering makes me mad; whenever one of my cats dies, I curseGod and I mean it; I feel fury at him.I d like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell himthat I think the world is screwed up, that man didn t sin and fall but was pushed which is bad enough but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.I have known all kinds of people (I m turning fifty in a month and I m angry about that; I ve lived along time) and those were by and large good people.I model the characters in my novels and storieson them.Now and again one of these people dies, and that makes me mad really mad, as mad as Ican get. You took my cat, I want to say to God, and then you took my girlfriend.What are youdoing? Listen to me; listen! It s wrong what you re doing. Basically, I am not serene.I grew up in Berkeley and inherited from it the social consciousnesswhich spread out over this country in the sixties and got rid of Nixon and ended the Vietnam War, plusa lot of other good things, such as the whole civil rights movement.Everyone in Berkeley gets mad atthe drop of a hat.I used to get mad at the FBI agents who dropped by to visit with me week after week(Mr.George Smith and Mr.George Scruggs of the Red Squad), and I got mad at friends of mine whowere members of the Communist Party; I got thrown out of the only meeting of the U.S.CommunistParty I ever attended because I leaped to my feet and vigorously (i.e., angrily) argued against whatthey were saying.That was in the early fifties, and now here we are in the very late seventies and I am still mad.Rightnow I am furious because of my best friend, a girl named Doris, 24 years old.She has cancer.I am inlove with someone who could die any time, and it makes fury against God and the world race throughme, elevating my blood pressure and stepping up my heartbeat.And so I write.I want to write aboutpeople I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actuallyhave, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.Okay, so I should revise mystandards, I m out of step.I should yield to reality.I have never yielded to reality.That s what sciencefiction is all about.If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literaryestablishment mainstream best-selling writers.But you are reading science fiction and I am writing itfor you.I want to show you, in my writing, what I love (my friends) and what I savagely hate (whathappens to them).I have watched Doris suffer unspeakably, undergo torment in her fight against cancer to a degreethat I cannot believe.One time I ran out of the apartment and up to a friend s place, literally ran.Mydoctor had told me that Doris wouldn t live much longer and I should say good-bye to her and tell her it was because she was dying.I tried to and couldn t, and then I panicked and ran
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